National and personal trauma needs healing. Makoto Shinkai guides us to find it through art.
"Probably I, too, would have remained trapped by the compulsion to protect the parents and, because it is also pervasive, would not have recognised it as such had I not come in contact with the child within me who appeared late in my life waiting to tell me secrets. She approached me very hesitantly speaking to me in an inarticulate way, but she took me by the hand and she led me into a territory that I had been avoiding all my life because it frightened me. Yet I had to go there. I could not keep on turning my back, for it was my territory. It was my very own territory. It was the place that I have attempted to forget so many years ago, the same place where I had abandoned the child that I once was. There she had to stay alone with her knowledge waiting until someone would come at last to listen to her and to believe her. Now I am standing at an open door, ill-prepared, filled with all the adult's fear of the darkness and malice of the past, but I could not bring myself to close the door and leave that child alone again until my death. Instead, I made a decision: that was to change my life profoundly. To let the child lead me. To put my trust in this nearly autistic being who has survived the isolation of decades." - Alice Miller.
